me that he expects his audience to "sur-
render to narrative." But his vigilance---
his investment in his viewers' relation-
ship with his material---can sometimes
feel like micromanagement. A camera
pan that essentially gives instructions
onhowtolookataphotocanbere-
velatory, or feel like a nudge in the ribs.
With repetition, a musical idea can
start to grate. In Burns's films, one rarely
sees a wide American landscape with-
out hearing the screech of a red-tailed
hawk. ("The Simpsons" follows the
same rule.) The opening clip of "The
Vietnam War" shows a marine, lying
in mud, raising a helmet on the end of
his rifle, to check for snipers. On the
soundtrack, there's then the ping of a
ricocheting bullet. Burns added the
ping, and said that the film shows no
evidence of a bullet hitting the helmet.
Ric Burns, connecting his brother's up-
bringing to the narrative "choke hold"
that he has sometimes felt in Ken's
work, said, "Part of the reason some
things get made is because one's grip is
so strong. It's very di cult to let go."
When I saw Burns in Sunapee, he
argued that fastidiousness about pho-
tographic authenticity would restrict
his ability to tell stories of people cut
o from cameras by poverty or geog-
raphy. He then explained what, at Flor-
entine Films, is known as Broyles's Law.
In the mid-eighties, Burns was work-
ing on a deft, entertaining documen-
tary about Huey Long, the populist
Louisiana politician. He asked two his-
torians, William Leuchtenburg and
Alan Brinkley, about a photograph he
hoped to use, as a part of the account
of Long's assassination; it showed him
protected by a phalanx of state troop-
ers. Brinkley told him that the image
might mislead; Long usually had plain-
clothes bodyguards. Burns felt thwarted.
Then Leuchtenburg spoke. He'd just
watched a football game in which
Frank Broyles, the former University
of Arkansas coach, was a commenta-
tor. When the game paused to allow a
hurt player to be examined, Broyles ex-
plained that coaches tend to gauge the
seriousness of an injury by asking a
player his name or the time of day; if
he can't answer correctly, it's serious.
As Burns recalled it, Broyles went on,
"But, of course, if the player is impor-
tant to the game, we tell him what his
name is, we tell him what time it is,
and we send him back in."
Broyles's Law, then, is: "If it's super-
important, if it's working, you tell him
what his name is, and you send him
back into the game." The photograph
of Long and the troopers stayed in
the film.
Was this, perhaps, a terrible law?
Burns laughed. "It's a ter-
rible law!" But, he went on,
it didn't let him o the
hook, ethically. "This would
be Werner Herzog's 'ecstatic
truth'---'I can do anything
I want. I'll pay the town
drunk to crawl across the
ice in the Russian village.' "
He was referring to scenes
in Herzog's "Bells from the
Deep," which Herzog has been happy
to describe, and defend, as stage-
managed. "If he chooses to do that,
that's O.K. And then there are other
people who'd rather do reënactments
than have a photograph that's vague."
Instead, Burns said, "We do enough
research that we can pretty much con-
vince ourselves---in the best sense of
the word---that we've done the hon-
orable job."
I later spoke to Herzog, who is a
friend of Burns's.Talking of "The Viet-
nam War," he said, "I binge-watched
it. I would feel itching: 'Let's continue.' "
When he was through, he called Burns.
"I just said, 'This is very big.' " The film
had flaws, he told me, "but it doesn't
matter." The project was at once sweep-
ing and serious. Herzog said, "Let's
focus on the big boulder of rock that
landed in the meadow and nobody
knows how it materialized."
In Sunapee, Burns and I took his
boat onto the lake with Olivia, his
twelve-year-old. We circled around an
island. After half an hour, returning at
some speed, Burns said, "I'm having
trouble with the brake!"Olivia screamed,
then stopped screaming long enough
to explain---"He does this every time,
it doesn't get old"---and then screamed
some more. The boat accelerated to-
ward the dock, where their dog stood,
barking. "I'm sorry, sweetie!" Burns
shouted over the engine. "I love you!"
We went out for ice cream, at the
harbor, and Burns told his daughters
that, "in the Civil War, when people
had been in combat---you know what
that means?---they said they'd 'seen
the elephant.' I guess it's just the most
exotic thing they could think of." He
noticed Olivia's bruised knees, and de-
scribed them in Burnsian terms: "You'd
expect to tilt up and see a tough boy."
As we drove back, with the sun low,
there was a family joke or two about
Trump. Then Olivia men-
tioned that she'd met Barack
Obama half a dozen times.
Burns is friendly with the
former President, and has
hopes of making at least one
documentary about him.
This idea has been discussed
with, but not yet blessed by,
its subject.
"He sent me a video
when I couldn't make it, remember?"
Olivia said. Burns pulled over, so that
he could find it on his phone. In the
spring of , Burns and his wife
were invited, along with a few other
couples, to an informal dinner at the
White House. "We had drinks out on
the porch, and we went out to the gar-
den that Michelle was growing," he
recalled. "Then we came in and ate."
A video clip from that night---an ar-
tifact from a now distant era---shows
the President in the private residence,
in a plaid shirt, looking into Burns's
phone camera. "Olivia, I miss you!"
Obama says. "I wish you were here
tonight. But, since you aren't, this is
the best I can do, to send you a mes-
sage. I hope you're doing good. I hope
school is fun." Burns drove on. "We
got there at six, we left at two. He
didn't want us to leave. He wanted to
dance more."
Earlier, Burns had said of the
Obama project, "I am a bull at a rodeo,
snorting to get out and do this. I would
love to sit down with him and do
fifteen or twenty two-hour sessions.
And make a film, in a couple of years,
that would be in his own words. It
would just be him. And then, in ten
years, we'd add all the other things.
So we could get at least fifteen years
away from Obama's Presidency and
triangulate." He went on, "Hopefully,
we'd have then left behind the specific
gravity of journalism, and near-history,
and passed to a place where we can
just do it."
THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 4, 2017
61